List 10 or 20 of the weakest skills or least played
"Changing the numbers wouldn't be very useful with so many mechanically bad skill designs that would need to be addressed first. You can already push the numbers on practically anything to varying extremes. Proper melee takes a lot more investment at a basic level than just about anything else, but even there you can still hit millions of DPS on junk skills like Sweep if you're so inclined to invest in gearing for it. It's still not fun to play with pumped up damage though, and there's not much reason to choose it for that style of skill over Cyclone other than for memes. Another example would be Voltaxic Burst. It can be absolutely, stupidly strong, but getting it to be can leave big gaps between when you're casting and when you're actually doing damage. It's dangerous in current PoE to just stand somewhere ramping it up, and it's way too easy to miss your damage window when you have to move around. It's very much a cast, then hit, then run skill, which ends up not being fun at all (while also being risky) in current PoE. Basically, the "weak" skills mainly go unplayed because they're just poorly designed or have shortcomings that leave them too inferior to much better options. Changing numbers won't fix that. I have a pretty good sense of humor. I'm not German.
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" But changing the numbers helps more than doing nothing, and it takes a very limited amount of effort and resources to do. I'm a very big fan of the melee versions of strike skills (Double Strike, Dual Strike, Heavy Strike). Are they mechanically "up to par"? Absolutely not. But when you get +3-4 additional targets and awakened Melee Splash, they are very fun to play when your damage is "up there". But to get the numbers "there" these days, requires a VERY good/expensive weapon and it requires you to sacrifice some defenses, because making an all-round strike character (that isn't semi-ranged, like LS, WS or FB) takes serious investment. Compare that to certain spells, that lets you focus 80% of your passive points on defense, while still having enough offense to beat most things, it looks rather stupid. Especially when you look at all the sources of +1 these days, that spells benefit A LOT from, while melee has no alternative to. Now, I do agree with you; they should absolutely improve the mechanics too. Melee Splash could be a mastery. They could make Tribal Fury a mastery, and/or add more sources of +1 additional targets for strike skills. But increasing numbers would go a long way too. Bring me some coffee and I'll bring you a smile.
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Burst on Hit
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"Practically everything you mention just goes to show the sorry state of melee mechanically compared to nearly anything else. And they already did do the "let's just push up the numbers" game in Legion, and how did that work out? Almost no one played much of anything but Cyclone, despite much better damage scaling for nearly everything, because it was also able to clear entire screens (and even offscreen with the right kit). Then nearly everything they did to boost melee damage numbers got walked back after Legion, some of it immediately and the rest over time. Slam skills of both the 1h and 2h variety did have a pretty decent run, but between destroying Seismic and the Great Damage Nerf patch, they pretty much got killed off. 2h can still be quite strong, but at a steep cost defensively. Most strike skills are just laughably bad for anything but single target without jumping through hoops, and even when you do jump through all those hoops they're outshined by nearly anything else in the game. Self-casting spells as a playstyle recently got similar Legion treatment. Numbers across the board were just pumped up without much other changes for a great many skills. The ones that were already pretty okay got better, but ones that felt bad to play mechanically, such as Lightning Tendrils, still feel bad to play. It's noticeably stronger than before, but there's no good reason to play it beyond wanting to do something different even though you know there are far, far better options (which I did for a good chunk of 3.17). Bows also got a pretty substantial boosts to bow damage. Who is really playing bow skills right now besides EA totems? Some of them are good at AoE but bad at single target, some are just plain mediocre. Others? No idea really. It's been a long time since I've found many bow skills desirable to play. Most of them just feel lacking to me. I dide hit up an old Ice Shot char not long ago, and it was mostly fine for mapping but felt awful against Eater. There's a lot of stuff that looks good on paper numbers-wise or is interesting conceptually, for both melee and others. But there's a big mismatch in how those skills and playstyles actually function compared with the gameplay more broadly. Even many skills and builds that work well enough in the campaign fall behind quickly in the endgame, where it's basically become GGG throwing everything and the kitchen sink at you. They're just not designed for it at a fundamental level. The up and down with the numbers bit has gone on for years, basically. It hasn't fixed anything and hasn't helped many unplayed "weak" skills get played, because their numbers aren't the true source of their weaknesses. In all but relatively few cases, it's not damage numbers that you have to find a way to compensate for. It's janky mechanics vs the rest of the game. I have a pretty good sense of humor. I'm not German. Last edited by aggromagnet#5565 on Jul 9, 2022, 10:31:23 PM
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So, like most of Path of Exile, when you want to talk about what makes a skill good the only short answer is "it's complicated."
Actual damage numbers do matter, but they aren't all that important except for determining which gets used out of two otherwise similar skills. Sweep and Cleave, for instance, are incredibly similar to each other but Sweep naturally has better damage than Cleave, so the one-in-ten-thousand players interested in playing Bad Cyclone are probably never going to take the weaker option of the two. But how do you compare a skill like Sweep to a skill like Tornado Shot? Obviously most people would rather play TShot, but articulating exactly what makes it so much better isn't nearly as easy as the Sweep-Cleave comparison because they are mechanically very different. The key phrase, and maybe the most important one for people to be using when discussing skill balance, is "Damage Projection." Damage Projection is simply, "how good is the skill at applying damage onto enemies and bosses?" Skills like Cyclone, Righteous Fire, and any minion/totem build are consistently popular because they have incredibly good damage projection: you can apply damage while moving, which means you don't have to stop dealing damage to dodge attacks from bosses. Lightning Strike actually has pretty bad damage numbers, as far as melee skills go, but its long range, built in multishot, and ability to grant Elusive makes it one of the best skills in the entire game from a damage projection standpoint. And a relative lack of damage is a far easier problem for players to solve than "How can I make this Glacial Hammer build mechanically better?" So rather than talk about buffing the numbers on skills most people consider "too bad to play," I think the focus needs to be on "how can skills with F-tier damage projection be MECHANICALLY improved?" Buffing Heavy Strike's damage numbers by an order of magnitude won't make it feel like a viable option for most players... but doing things like adding range, built in melee splash, halving the mana cost, and increasing the attack speed? Now we're getting somewhere. |
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" Yeah, that one's actually sad. There was a time when no build of mine would go WITHOUT conversion trap. But since they put the same limitation on it as on other, really powerfull traps, it's just not worth it anymore. It used to be great for crowd control. Conversion + Multi, throw a handful and you were out of harm's way for a while. Also great for hijacking "allies cannot die totems". But these days... rather useless. Bird lover of Wraeclast
Las estrellas te iluminan - Hoy te sirven de guía Te sientes tan fuerte que piensas - que nadie te puede tocar |
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Chain hook isn't weak, it is just mechanically clunky. I did a build with it the first league it came out, and it pretty much works like a flicker strike that you need to manually position and occasionally doesn't flicker (when you miss the enemy).
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No-one mentioned ensnaring arrow yet... I think that means it wins right?
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" It helps plenty of them get played but those numbers won't appear in statistics because the community measures everything off ninja and the path of least resistance. Skills could have perfect parity and 90% would be on the same 3, its the way the playerbase plays now there is too much focus on success and the build freedom has become a mild secondary. So you have to instead measure by just asking does this work? That's a bar that is different for each of us but plenty of skills in last patches spell buff for example were pushed to being OK because of said buff. Are the masses going to use them? No but there are only ~4 slots the masses will use and they are occupied. Tbh GGG are responsible for this by being so poor at this particular aspect, they made so many skills such bad choices for so long that nobody is willing to chance anymore. This feeds into the cycle of we only play strong, so no point buffing underused because nobody plays etc. |
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" Ensnaring arrow is an important single target adjunct for EA Ballista and some bleed bow builds. Because targets count as moving, it magnifies the bleed effect. But because they aren't really moving very fast, they're sitting ducks for overlapping or shotgunning effects such as EA or barrage-supported midrange (totems) spells and attacks. By itself it's kind of poo. But then bear trap is also kind of poo by itself, but in combination with other traps or mines, it has a lot of single target utility. [19:36]#Mirror_stacking_clown: try smoke ganja every day for 10 years and do memory game
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